Eloy or the Flower Kings

Logan wrote: ^^ I wonder how many of those posts int that thread were made by you? I got the impression that it's a relatively small group of people (or groups because it has been going since 2009) who post in that topic a lot. If you look at rateyourmusic, The Flower King's most rated album, Stardust We Are, has 744 ratings and 21 reviews. Eloy's most rated, Ocean, has 2,489 and 61 reviews. Eloy has five albums with over 1000 ratings each. https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the-flower-kings https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/eloy Neither are top ranked/ rated players in Prog or progressive music, and I agree with AFlowerKingEloy, oops, that it shouldn't be a contest. I don't treat these polls as contests.

AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: verslibre wrote: AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: ^We all like what we like. It shouldn't be a contest. ;) Say what now?  AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: I'm not sure why the idea of having these two going against each other was going through my head today but there it is.   Yes, but just because I like band A better than band B doesn't mean band A is actually better. It's just my opinion. No matter how much I scream and jump up and down I won't change your opinion and vice versa.

Mike's next poll will feature Mr. Bungle "going against" Philip Glass. It should be interesting!

verslibre wrote: Mike's next poll will feature Mr. Bungle "going against" Philip Glass. It should be interesting!

Psychedelic Paul wrote: One band has the Power and the Passion and the other band has the Flower Power. The end result? It's Time to Turn to Eloy, so the final score is... Krauts 2  Swedes 1

progaardvark wrote: Logan wrote: ^^ I wonder how many of those posts int that thread were made by you? I got the impression that it's a relatively small group of people (or groups because it has been going since 2009) who post in that topic a lot. If you look at rateyourmusic, The Flower King's most rated album, Stardust We Are, has 744 ratings and 21 reviews. Eloy's most rated, Ocean, has 2,489 and 61 reviews. Eloy has five albums with over 1000 ratings each. https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the-flower-kings https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/eloy Neither are top ranked/ rated players in Prog or progressive music, and I agree with AFlowerKingEloy, oops, that it shouldn't be a contest. I don't treat these polls as contests. However, wouldn't it be a more accurate comparison to use their entire discographies? Eloy has been around a lot longer and more votes for albums skew towards albums from the 1970s. There is a 24 year difference between Eloy's debut and TFK's debut. If TFK's earlier albums were given another 24 years, they may eventually reach similar numbers of votes. For that reason I think it would make more sense to take the number of votes and multiply it by the rating for each studio album. Take that total across the entire discography and divide it by the number of total votes. Ignoring soundtracks, compilations, and fan club releases, you'll find that Eloy's total rating is 3.55 and TFK's is 3.54. Essentially the two groups, according to RYM voters, are about the same in quality. If Eloy had not made the Ra (2.84) and Destination (2.76) albums, their rating would increase to 3.58. TFK's lowest rated album is Adam & Eve at 3.33.  Eloy clearly had the better peak of the two bands, but the tail end of their career has some significant lows (a range of 2.76 to 3.71 across the whole discography). TFK doesn't have a comparable peak, but it's not a slouch in that department either (first four are over 3.60). TFK excels in consistency (3.33 to 3.68). A graph would show this better, but I don't have the means or the time to make these. Just some food for thought.

I was thinking specifically of what band is more popular as in better-known, but yes, It would be better to look at the whole discography and then I would count the number of unique raters (in other words, a user would only be counted once no matter how many albums they rated -- rather like with the The Flower King Appreciation thread, I would sooner count number of people who participated than pages if I could be arsed). I addressed in my last post that post Eloy classic era it does not get much recognition. It's modern albums have far less than spectacular numbers of raters and the ratings are not high. Like a lot of Prog bands, Eloy is really known (in Prog circles) for its classic 70s period. I would be very surprised if The Flower Kings is as well-known a name as Eloy in 10 years or more despite that sadly, many Eloy admirers will pass away in the next ten years.

I don't think either band are that impressive in terms of numbers at RYM. Look at a much more modern band included in PA like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and how many ratings it has accrued in the past 11 years: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard

I doubt The Flower Kings will ever reach those kinds of numbers there even if they start releasing five albums a year. Or my beloved Swans, which did release its first album 12 years before The Flower Kings first in 1983, but looking at the 2010 up period, The Flower Kings top rated Banks of Eden has 471 ratings, it's next most has 341. With Swans for the same period, the most rated has 26,683 ratings, then the next highest in that period has 20,638. It only has one other alnum that has more than 20,000 ratings. But that does not mean that much for PA as Swans may be much more popular at RYM, but one is lucky if a thread on it here can get several pages of responses and its not that popular in our database (I did a poll earlier today with it as an option that got zero responses). So ideally the numbers are parsed from many sources and we have to consider coverage in the press over the years. The RYM and PA audiences overlap, but alos have significant differences. One should not draw too many conclusions on general popularity from a very limited number of sources. While I would have thought that Eloy would be niche, I would have thought The Flower Kings to be very niche.


Edited by Logan - August 22 2023 at 16:18

Logan wrote: Catcher10 wrote: Logan wrote: ^^ I wonder how many of those posts int that thread were made by you? I got the impression that it's a relatively small group of people (or groups because it has been going since 2009) who post in that topic a lot. If you look at rateyourmusic, The Flower King's most rated album, Stardust We Are, has 744 ratings and 21 reviews. Eloy's most rated, Ocean, has 2,489 and 61 reviews. Eloy has five albums with over 1000 ratings each. https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the-flower-kings https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/eloy Neither are top ranked/ rated players in Prog or progressive music, and I agree with AFlowerKingEloy, oops, that it shouldn't be a contest. I don't treat these polls as contests. I think I made 6 posts there ........I prefer TFK over Eloy, but I prefer Ocean over a lot of TFK albums. I would bet a lot of the posters on that thread are no longer even active on PA anymore  Six, sure. It's sad that so many have left the forums. But 14 years of that thread.... By the way, beyond the having had very frequent posters there issue, I was thinking that one thing that TFK has going for it has been that there has been a lot of talk there about expected albums and new album, but I just looked more into Eloy's discography and I see that they have released four album since 2009, the year the TFK appreciation thread started. I had heard about one of those at least, But Eloy is really thought of for its 70s album by most, which make it old news (I won't posit if Eloy are has-beens, but looking at the ratings at RYM for modern Eloy they don't look amazing). I'm much more of an Inside and Floating amn* than Ocean, but than I tend to favour the more psych/space music to Symph. ^ makes me think of Baron Harkonnen from the Lynch version of Dune. "Bring in that floating fat man, the Baron" (The Emperor) since I am recalling childhood fave sci-fi films.

verslibre wrote: AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: verslibre wrote: Mike's next poll will feature Mr. Bungle "going against" Philip Glass. It should be interesting! No, it will be Camel vs Dream Theater.  To me the style doesn't really matter much. It's more about what I consider to be a "fair fight." Bah. Easy.

Re The Flower Kings, have to keep pointing out (because their fans are in de nile lol) that their most rated and also highest rated album on here is Banks Of Eden. The earlier stuff is all over the shop and none is a masterpeice because Roine had no idea where the edit button is.  I think there is a big disconnect between what their fans think and what general prog fans think and i am only going on what the reviews on this site suggest. Maybe that's normal.

Eloy easily.  I haven't heard recent stuff by TFK but I'm guessing that it's better than the last couple of Eloy albums  :)